Leonora Carrington
By:
April 6, 2013
Inspired by the surrealists (especially Max Ernst, with whom she shared both love and art), LEONORA CARRINGTON is the most famous and infamous “Mexican” artist born in Clayton-le-Woods, Lancashire, England! Having barely survived the havoc of WWII and an enforced stay at a sanitarium, she was granted sanctuary and asylum (pun intended) in Mexico. Mexico, too, nurtured and suffused Carrington’s surreal visions and nightmares; and it was where she took up with another remarkable 20th-century sorceress of the canvas, Remedios Varo, with whom Carrington studied the Popol Vuh, alchemy, and the Kabbalah. A tour of her artwork casts visitors into a Dantean inferno of nightmarish tapestries where bestial chimeras, handsome warlocks, berobed sages, and dark geometries are the name of the game. With Varo and the likes of Frida Kahlo, Salvador Dalí, and Luis Buñuel, her evocative mundos remark the worlds of desire, dreams, nightmares, and hallucinations. Born in England but hecho en Mexico, Carrington put the sur in surrealism.
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On his or her birthday, HiLobrow irregularly pays tribute to one of our high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes. Also born this date: Alexander Herzen, Gerry Mulligan, Black Francis, Georges Darien, Guy Peellaert.
READ MORE about members of the New Gods Generation (1914-23).